A Visit With The Condors. Another Death Valley Bikepack

 

 

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” — Winston Churchill. 

February 2026 

An overnighter to view the Condor petroglyphs.  I had never heard of these before so when I finally did, I sleuthed out the location and created a long looping route stitching together both past routes I've done and new to me areas into a long 400+ mile route through and around Death Valley National Park.  I then added it to my backlog of trips to do. 

 

Early February finally afforded the opportunity to ride the route.

I packed my bike in the late afternoon and rode for several hours before making camp in the canyon. 

 

The next morning I rode up and over the pass and down to a predetermined spot to leave my bike and begin the relatively short hike to the petroglyph panels. I am purposely not disclosing the exact location of these glyphs although if I can find them so can you.

Marble Bath again looking rather sad.

The panel's are stunning!

 

After viewing the panel's and hiking back to my bike I continued on down to the springs and made camp for the night. I took a nice soak in the warm springs before retiring to my tent. Unfortunately a dust storm came up that night and made the zippers on my tent wholly unusable. It's more than a little embarrasing because I didn't understand then that this was an easily field repairable event and it ended up causing me to abort the rest of my trip because I knew the weather was changing in few days to rain and possibly snow. Fighting my way out of the tent in the morning, I made the agonizing decision to ride back out the way I came in. 

 

 

My riding partner was supposed to be coming in today and I expected to see him on the way out. As I arrived back to my truck, he was just pulling up...surprise! For details on the rest of the route please see his blog post Mega Death Tour - Death Valley.  Kurstin made a huge effort and completed the rest of the route in challenging conditions and now solo. But it was mere training for his Big Brazil Trip that followed. Link when he completes his blog!